Ever been at a 4 way intersection when the stop lights are out?..., everyone co-operates and acts like there's 4 way stop sign.
Of course they do. Legally, there is no difference. The intersection doesn't become a free-for-all just because the lights are out. If the lights are present but not working, it's considered an all-way stop, and proceeding through without stopping is no different than running a stop sign or stop light.
While this does demonstrate a degree of cooperation, it's no different than the cooperation you see at a working stop light, an intersection with stop signs, or really just about any other situation involving the rules of the road.
I do agree that humans generally prefer cooperation to conflict, all else being equal. It's the unequal cases which are interesting. Cooperation isn't always a winning strategy for the individual, or even for the group. Sometimes the majority is simply wrong, and the group is better served by testing different strategies against each other and seeing which ones actually work best.
I do things for profit (my paycheck) so I can do the things that are truly worth doing.
Profit includes more than just money; it's the difference in value between the return and opportunity cost. For you, playing soccer with your daughter is profitable; you value the experience more than the time and energy it costs.
If you wanted to, you could attach a (hypothetical) dollar value to each aspect—time, energy, and experience—and calculate whether the action is really profitable. The experience part is hardest to price, but even there you can set a threshold: how much money would it take to convince you to forgo the experience? Enough to guarantee that your daughter will never need to worry about the cost of treatment for any non-terminal medical condition?
This sort of analysis is more useful when there are multiple people involved with distinct preferences. When it's just you, you can just decide which is more important directly. When multiple people are involved, prices are usually the only objective metric available to indicate what people value, within the limits of what they've earned through surplus production and saving.
Driver alledges his dispatcher told him to answer the phone even while driving and he did so, claiming this led to the accident.... Dispatcher and other management had signed statements on record with their insuror stating they educated their drivers in all applicable state and local laws as part of regular training...
These seems to be the only two relevant statements. The driver was educated in the applicable laws, and knowingly broke them, leading to the accident. It was the driver's choice, and thus the driver's fault.
When someone tells you to break the law, even your employer, you ignore them. That's just basic common sense, particularly when you've been trained in the laws specific to your situation and the other person (like the dispatcher in this case) has not.
I'm pretty sure your employer cannot expect you to perform illegal activities to maintain your job.
I think that depends on the state, specifically on whether the employer needs to give a reason for ending the employment. No court will uphold a contract requiring illegal activities, of course, but that doesn't automatically mean your job will continue to exist. (The likelihood that your employer may be facing charges for "inciting" illegal behavior makes that even less likely.)
Moving back toward the topic, I am firmly of the opinion that responsibility should end with the last person whose choice led to the outcome, not be spread out over everyone involved, however peripherally. In this case, that would be the driver. The entire situation could have been avoided by simply waiting to read the text when not on the road. Concerns about keeping one's job do not affect one's legal obligations.
OK, so you decide to solve the problem of thermal expansion by measuring the temperature and calculating in software the effect of it on the period of your clock, and correct, still in software, the time accordingly. Patent worthy or not?
Obviously not. You're transparently attempting to patent a mathematical formula (dt' = dt * f(T)). Math is not patentable. Why would it make any difference that you've translated the formula from traditional notation into software, another form of math?
And as long as the people you trade your coins with avoids linking their keys to each other or to their real-world identity.
That won't make any difference unless they know who you are, or have some traceable connection to you outside the Bitcoin network. If I trade Bitcoins for online services, for example—like hosting, or access to a digital download—and take the proper precautions, the other party need never know who provided the payment or received the service. At that point it doesn't matter how private they are.
If I invent a way to resurrect dinosaurs ala Jurassic Park, and they key invention for doing so is a gene sequencing computer program, that's a new invention.
No, for two reasons. First, the "gene sequencing computer program" is nothing more or less than a mathematical function transforming abstract input data to abstract output data. Mathematical functions are not new; you don't invent them, you discover them. As non-patentable subject matter, it ought to be impossible to infringe on any patent simply by describing a mathematical function to someone, whether in traditional mathematical notation or in the form of a computer program, or by evaluating it, whether mentally, with pen and paper, or with a computer.
Second, you can't resurrect dinosaurs using nothing but a computer program. Merely running a program doesn't change anything in the real world. The "key invention" would be some kind of biological cloning process, not "a gene sequencing computer program", even if the program gives you useful data for the process. If the cloning process already existed, and you just lacked the data to make it work for dinosaurs, then too bad—there's nothing new to patent. At least you get to make some cool dinosaurs, assuming whoever holds the patent on the cloning process doesn't stop you.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous. Sure, the transaction history is public, but in regard to personally identifying information it only contains public keys, hashes of public keys, and signatures made using the corresponding private keys. Keys can be generated at will—one person can have a thousand different keys, or several people can share one (provided they trust each other).
Naturally, it's up to the user to avoid linking their keys to each other or to their real-world identity. You can avoid linking your IP address easily enough by connecting to the network via Tor or I2P. Avoiding a link to your real-world name and address is much harder when you're ordering physical goods or services.
Create a new account and wait - 24 to 48 hours - before you are allowed to post comments.
The problem with this approach is that someone who knows they're going to be banned can just create a number of accounts in advance, and burn through them sequentially. They don't actually have to wait 24 to 48 hours after being banned before they can start posting again under a new account, provided they plan ahead.
Personally, I would like to see secure, anonymous authentication as a service. You would have an account with a trusted identity provider, to which you would provide sufficient evidence to prove that you are a real, unique person. (Think driver's license & utility bill, like for bank accounts.) To use a third-party site, they would ask the provider to authenticate you, and get back a token which is unique to your account at that site. (E.g. a hash of your real identity and the site's public key.) Each site gets a different token, and the tokens don't tell the side who you really are, so they can't easily correlate their user databases. However, they do know that you are a real person and that you can only have one account, so they can restrict access for bad behavior and be sure the same person can't just go and create a new account.
The main downside of this approach is the effective natural monopoly held by the identity provider. The site has to trust that the provider is doing its job and limiting people to a single account, so it can't accept just any provider as with OpenID. On the other hand, people won't want to establish identities with many different providers—they'll want to use the same account to authenticate everywhere, not one for each site. Also, if there are multiple providers they'll need to coordinate so that you can't create separate accounts with each of them. All of these factors contribute to a networking effect which gives the dominant provider a strong bargaining position against both sites and users.
Congress (then the Senate) have to pass laws changing the powers given to the NSA to spy.
To change the powers, yes, assuming they were even constutional in the first place. However, the President is the head of the Executive branch—he could always instruct the NSA, etc., not to use the powers Congress granted, at least until Congress passed another law making the spying mandatory.
Your example describes something known as barter which has, for the purpose of zero-sum game discussion, nothing to do with capitalism.
On the contrary, private ownership of property and unhindered, voluntary trade between individuals, particularly in regard to capital goods, is pretty much all there is to capitalism. Those are the only preconditions; if you can barter without third-party interference or the threat of being deprived of your property by force, a capitalistic economy will inevitably develop. My example was intentionally trivial, but the principle applies equally well to trade in land, machinery, labor, or any other kind of good.
Capitalism can be distinguished from other economic systems in that it has a built-in reward for efficiently accumulating, maintaining, and utilizing capital goods, which in turn increase the value of other goods. Other economic systems deal with capital, of course; you can't have a serious economy without it. However, they aren't nearly as good at it. Not only are there issues with central planning in general, but they lack the incentives to find the most efficient allocation which a private owner would have, and are also hampered by competing political goals. Public ownership of the means of production basically just means that after a time, there won't be any means of production, because whatever capital you started with will be mismanaged and consumed by people who lack either the necessary talents and/or skills or a personal stake in the outcome.
Of course Capitalism is a zero-sum game, if it looks like it isn't you just haven't accounted for everything and externalised some costs somewhere in the system.
Capitalism is not a zero-sum game. Available resources may be zero-sum, but how they are allocated is not. If I have some food, but I'm bored rather than hungry, and you're hungry but have only a non-edible DVD, we both benefit from swapping the food and the movie. A different allocation of the same resources results in a net gain, with no externalized costs.
Capitalism is all about allocating resources to where they can do the most good through a mass of individual trades, each of which is expected—by those directly involved, who have the most at stake—to result in a net benefit without externalities.
Yes, and that's exactly what private capital holders would become in a libertarian society. With property ownership the only law, and no restrictions on private use of deadly force to protect those 'rights'...
You have a contradiction here. Your private property rights (including self-ownership) are exactly the restrictions on the private use of deadly force which you claim wouldn't exist. So long as you respect the property rights of others, the law is on your side. Obviously there can still be crime; libertarians are not utopians. But the prospect of crime as crime is far superior to the same criminal actions being masqueraded as "legitimate" when undertaken by a government.
... there'd be no central government or social contract to prevent private individuals buying up all the local land, trade, and water rights, and then turning everyone else at literal gunpoint into lifetime-contracted debtors and renters
You seem to have completely missed the irony of fighting this hypothetical doomsday scenario by bringing in a government to claim ownership (via regulation) of all the land, trade, and water rights (without even buying any of it!), and forcing an involuntary social "contract" on everyone else at literal gunpoint which would make them lifetime debtors and renters (via income and property taxes, resp.). All the while arguing, moreover, that they have some inherent right to control everything and everyone and that anyone who chooses to resist is a bad person for doing nothing more than exercising their own natural rights. Your solution is strictly worse than the problem.
There would be no line at all between 'landlord' and 'feudal lord with absolute monopoly power'... after all, that's what landlord meant back in the Middle Ages.
Naturally, since in the Middle Ages landlords were the government, not mere private property owners. The prevailing attitude that they somehow had a "right to rule", the attitude which allowed them to go beyond simply owning property and get away with acts of aggression, is exactly what libertarians are so opposed to.
Somalia is hardly a libertarian society—there may not be a central government, but tribal elders are granted a similar status at a more local level, with the power to make laws and meet out punishments as they see fit. However, if you were attempting to imply that a society without a central government, like Somalia, would necessarily be an undesirable place to live, you should compare Somalia now to Somalia back when they still had a government. By nearly every measure the people of Somalia experienced an increase in their standard of living after the central government fell. The one notable exception was a decline in the literacy rate, which is unsurprising when you consider that the former government was most likely attempting to boost the literacy rate to make itself look good regardless of the actual preferences of its citizens.
The broad scope of the warrant ensures this. Since there is a secret warrant backing this, this is not unconstitutional.
There are constitutional requirements for warrants which cannot be met so long as the warrant is secret:
no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
"A broad scope" would mean that the warrant fails fails to particularly describe the place to be searched. Moreover, the requirement for probable cause is fundamentally impossible to reconcile with the idea of a "secret warrant". Before a warrant can be issued, they have to establish probable cause, and produce the evidence ("Oath or affirmation") supporting it, at which point the warrant is no longer a secret.
Then there is the fact that legislating anything secret, or for that matter prohibiting any form of communication on any topic, runs squarely and obviously afoul of the First Amendment right to free speech... Whatever specific kinds of speech the authors may or may not have had in mind, there are no exceptions whatsoever in the text; not for national security, or copyright, or anything else.
Actually, it isn't necessarily illegal. It is definitely unconstitutional, which trumps legality in this country.
The Constitution is part of the law (the highest part), so any action which is unconstitutional is also illegal, regardless of any lesser laws claiming otherwise. Constitutionality doesn't trump legality, it trumps unconstitutional laws.
That's the problem right there. You can't encrypt a single message for multiple recipients without making a separate, encrypted copy for each recipient, unless every recipient has a copy of the same private key.
While that is true, most systems employ a mix of public- and private-key cryptography, if only because public-key crypto is comparatively slow and become more so for large plaintexts. The message itself is encrypted once with a single symmetric key, which is then encrypted separately for each recipient. There is thus no need to duplicate and distribute the entire message for each recipient, just the message-specific symmetric key.
There is a large amplification effect, so this is not a practical system for general mail delivery, any more than most people would use blind drops to exchange casual letters. It's reasonable so long as the encrypted messages represent a small fraction of the normal traffic on the forum. Any more and the forum operators will take steps to block such messages as spam.
Seeing how you can only use public key crypto for a 1:1 communication, this system would not scale at all.
You're thinking of shared (private) key crypto, where each channel needs a unique key. With public key crypto, he can distribute the public key to as many people as he wants, and any of them can send him a message securely by encrypting it with the public key and posting it to a public forum. Only the person with the corresponding private key can decrypt any of the messages, and if he's careful not to give away his interest in any particular encrypted messages, no one need know which ones he is capable of decrypting.
... SMTP is inherently unable to provide security against traffic analysis. Even if the body of the email is encrypted, the headers cannot be.
I2P-Bote is one alternative, an experimental distributed e-mail system which addresses the header issue. It's implemented as a distributed hash table with connectivity through I2P. The design allows senders and receivers to remain anonymous, in addition to encrypting the content of the messages.
It's because the only rights that the Republican party cares about are (a) the right to property...; and (b) the right to bear arms.
Given property and self-defense, all other rights follow naturally, at least within a system of negative rights (freedom from interference). Freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable search or seizure, the right to due process, and all the rest are just specific applications of your property rights.
On the other hand, if you subscribe to the idea of positive rights (the "right" to make others provide you with food, shelter, health care, etc.) then the objections to private property and people capable of defending themselves are understandable; but such a philosophy is inherently inconsistent anyway.
But then the bank charges interest, so then from 10 pounds of gold you end up with debtors owe 510 pounds..., and thus it becomes impossible... for them to all pay off, since there is no longer enough gold in the world to cover the debts.
You can eventually pay off any debt, no matter how large, with any non-zero amount of currency, provided the currency remains in circulation. You just have to do it incrementally. You pay the bank, the bank puts the gold back into circulation (if only to pay its own expenses), you get paid, you pay the bank, etc.; repeat until the debt is paid. Naturally, both the interest rate and rate of circulation factor in to whether you can pay the loan off faster than it grows, but the actual amount of gold in the world isn't the main obstacle.
Also, the sort of fractional-reserve lending you describe has become much more prevalent, with lower actual reserves, with the addition of a central bank. Reserves were never as low under the free banking system as they became after the creation of the Federal Reserve, despite legally regulated minimum reserve requirements. Individual banks may be more stable due to FDIC deposit insurance, but the system as a whole is much closer to the edge.
The only question is whether the driver is a derivative work or not, which is a complicated legal term which didn't have software in consideration when it was (poorly) defined.
That is a complicated question, but in this case the real question is simpler: is the combination of the kernel and the driver on a running system a derivative work of the kernel? The two are distributed together, which makes it no different than a closed-source program distributed with a GPL library dependency. (Think of the kernel as the "library"—it doesn't matter which part is larger.) If binary modules do not violate the GPL, then GPL and LGPL are effectively equivalent for libraries, which would be a significant change.
It is much less likely that something like the nVidia binary driver, which is carefully not distributed with the kernel, or even specific to Linux, would be considered a derivative work. However, as you say, that area of copyright is not clearly specified for software.
Re:It's Qualcomm's decision to make
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Well then good thing the Linux kernel isn't licensed under the GPL. It's licensed under a modified GPL allowing for binary drivers.
Stop spreading misinformation. There is no exception for binary drivers. There is a clarification that the kernel copyright "does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of 'derived work'." User programs; not drivers. Otherwise it's stock GPLv2.
Here's the actual license so you can see for yourself.
A few companies like nVidia get around this by never distributing the drivers with the kernel. In nVidia's case, they use the same driver for Windows and Linux, so they can also argue that there is nothing Linux-specific about the part they're distributing. Even so, many see this as a grey area. The Android case is completely different, both because these are Linux-specific drivers and because they are being distributed with the Linux kernel on the same media as part of a complete operating system. This is just as much a violation of the license as distributing a closed-source program which depends on a GPL library.
It'd be one thing if this was in a third-party android device; nobody is insisting that Google must require every Android device to have open drivers, too.
No one is insisting that Google police all the other Android device manufacturers, no. However, anyone shipping an Android device with closed-source kernel drivers is not following the terms of the GPL, which means they have no license to redistribute the Linux kernel. Legally speaking, no matter what Google requires, it's a choice between open drivers and copyright infringement.
So who's going to do all the work and labor for those in the space station?
It's possible to be wealthy and still willing to put in some manual labor where necessary. Plenty of people with enough wealth to retire on still choose to work, or volunteer their time with various charities. Or they may be wealthy enough to find ways to avoid the need for what we would consider "work", for example through automation.
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Ever been at a 4 way intersection when the stop lights are out? ..., everyone co-operates and acts like there's 4 way stop sign.
Of course they do. Legally, there is no difference. The intersection doesn't become a free-for-all just because the lights are out. If the lights are present but not working, it's considered an all-way stop, and proceeding through without stopping is no different than running a stop sign or stop light.
While this does demonstrate a degree of cooperation, it's no different than the cooperation you see at a working stop light, an intersection with stop signs, or really just about any other situation involving the rules of the road.
I do agree that humans generally prefer cooperation to conflict, all else being equal. It's the unequal cases which are interesting. Cooperation isn't always a winning strategy for the individual, or even for the group. Sometimes the majority is simply wrong, and the group is better served by testing different strategies against each other and seeing which ones actually work best.
I do things for profit (my paycheck) so I can do the things that are truly worth doing.
Profit includes more than just money; it's the difference in value between the return and opportunity cost. For you, playing soccer with your daughter is profitable; you value the experience more than the time and energy it costs.
If you wanted to, you could attach a (hypothetical) dollar value to each aspect—time, energy, and experience—and calculate whether the action is really profitable. The experience part is hardest to price, but even there you can set a threshold: how much money would it take to convince you to forgo the experience? Enough to guarantee that your daughter will never need to worry about the cost of treatment for any non-terminal medical condition?
This sort of analysis is more useful when there are multiple people involved with distinct preferences. When it's just you, you can just decide which is more important directly. When multiple people are involved, prices are usually the only objective metric available to indicate what people value, within the limits of what they've earned through surplus production and saving.
Driver alledges his dispatcher told him to answer the phone even while driving and he did so, claiming this led to the accident. ... Dispatcher and other management had signed statements on record with their insuror stating they educated their drivers in all applicable state and local laws as part of regular training...
These seems to be the only two relevant statements. The driver was educated in the applicable laws, and knowingly broke them, leading to the accident. It was the driver's choice, and thus the driver's fault.
When someone tells you to break the law, even your employer, you ignore them. That's just basic common sense, particularly when you've been trained in the laws specific to your situation and the other person (like the dispatcher in this case) has not.
I'm pretty sure your employer cannot expect you to perform illegal activities to maintain your job.
I think that depends on the state, specifically on whether the employer needs to give a reason for ending the employment. No court will uphold a contract requiring illegal activities, of course, but that doesn't automatically mean your job will continue to exist. (The likelihood that your employer may be facing charges for "inciting" illegal behavior makes that even less likely.)
Moving back toward the topic, I am firmly of the opinion that responsibility should end with the last person whose choice led to the outcome, not be spread out over everyone involved, however peripherally. In this case, that would be the driver. The entire situation could have been avoided by simply waiting to read the text when not on the road. Concerns about keeping one's job do not affect one's legal obligations.
OK, so you decide to solve the problem of thermal expansion by measuring the temperature and calculating in software the effect of it on the period of your clock, and correct, still in software, the time accordingly. Patent worthy or not?
Obviously not. You're transparently attempting to patent a mathematical formula (dt' = dt * f(T)). Math is not patentable. Why would it make any difference that you've translated the formula from traditional notation into software, another form of math?
And as long as the people you trade your coins with avoids linking their keys to each other or to their real-world identity.
That won't make any difference unless they know who you are, or have some traceable connection to you outside the Bitcoin network. If I trade Bitcoins for online services, for example—like hosting, or access to a digital download—and take the proper precautions, the other party need never know who provided the payment or received the service. At that point it doesn't matter how private they are.
If I invent a way to resurrect dinosaurs ala Jurassic Park, and they key invention for doing so is a gene sequencing computer program, that's a new invention.
No, for two reasons. First, the "gene sequencing computer program" is nothing more or less than a mathematical function transforming abstract input data to abstract output data. Mathematical functions are not new; you don't invent them, you discover them. As non-patentable subject matter, it ought to be impossible to infringe on any patent simply by describing a mathematical function to someone, whether in traditional mathematical notation or in the form of a computer program, or by evaluating it, whether mentally, with pen and paper, or with a computer.
Second, you can't resurrect dinosaurs using nothing but a computer program. Merely running a program doesn't change anything in the real world. The "key invention" would be some kind of biological cloning process, not "a gene sequencing computer program", even if the program gives you useful data for the process. If the cloning process already existed, and you just lacked the data to make it work for dinosaurs, then too bad—there's nothing new to patent. At least you get to make some cool dinosaurs, assuming whoever holds the patent on the cloning process doesn't stop you.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous. Sure, the transaction history is public, but in regard to personally identifying information it only contains public keys, hashes of public keys, and signatures made using the corresponding private keys. Keys can be generated at will—one person can have a thousand different keys, or several people can share one (provided they trust each other).
Naturally, it's up to the user to avoid linking their keys to each other or to their real-world identity. You can avoid linking your IP address easily enough by connecting to the network via Tor or I2P. Avoiding a link to your real-world name and address is much harder when you're ordering physical goods or services.
Create a new account and wait - 24 to 48 hours - before you are allowed to post comments.
The problem with this approach is that someone who knows they're going to be banned can just create a number of accounts in advance, and burn through them sequentially. They don't actually have to wait 24 to 48 hours after being banned before they can start posting again under a new account, provided they plan ahead.
Personally, I would like to see secure, anonymous authentication as a service. You would have an account with a trusted identity provider, to which you would provide sufficient evidence to prove that you are a real, unique person. (Think driver's license & utility bill, like for bank accounts.) To use a third-party site, they would ask the provider to authenticate you, and get back a token which is unique to your account at that site. (E.g. a hash of your real identity and the site's public key.) Each site gets a different token, and the tokens don't tell the side who you really are, so they can't easily correlate their user databases. However, they do know that you are a real person and that you can only have one account, so they can restrict access for bad behavior and be sure the same person can't just go and create a new account.
The main downside of this approach is the effective natural monopoly held by the identity provider. The site has to trust that the provider is doing its job and limiting people to a single account, so it can't accept just any provider as with OpenID. On the other hand, people won't want to establish identities with many different providers—they'll want to use the same account to authenticate everywhere, not one for each site. Also, if there are multiple providers they'll need to coordinate so that you can't create separate accounts with each of them. All of these factors contribute to a networking effect which gives the dominant provider a strong bargaining position against both sites and users.
Congress (then the Senate) have to pass laws changing the powers given to the NSA to spy.
To change the powers, yes, assuming they were even constutional in the first place. However, the President is the head of the Executive branch—he could always instruct the NSA, etc., not to use the powers Congress granted, at least until Congress passed another law making the spying mandatory.
Your example describes something known as barter which has, for the purpose of zero-sum game discussion, nothing to do with capitalism.
On the contrary, private ownership of property and unhindered, voluntary trade between individuals, particularly in regard to capital goods, is pretty much all there is to capitalism. Those are the only preconditions; if you can barter without third-party interference or the threat of being deprived of your property by force, a capitalistic economy will inevitably develop. My example was intentionally trivial, but the principle applies equally well to trade in land, machinery, labor, or any other kind of good.
Capitalism can be distinguished from other economic systems in that it has a built-in reward for efficiently accumulating, maintaining, and utilizing capital goods, which in turn increase the value of other goods. Other economic systems deal with capital, of course; you can't have a serious economy without it. However, they aren't nearly as good at it. Not only are there issues with central planning in general, but they lack the incentives to find the most efficient allocation which a private owner would have, and are also hampered by competing political goals. Public ownership of the means of production basically just means that after a time, there won't be any means of production, because whatever capital you started with will be mismanaged and consumed by people who lack either the necessary talents and/or skills or a personal stake in the outcome.
Of course Capitalism is a zero-sum game, if it looks like it isn't you just haven't accounted for everything and externalised some costs somewhere in the system.
Capitalism is not a zero-sum game. Available resources may be zero-sum, but how they are allocated is not. If I have some food, but I'm bored rather than hungry, and you're hungry but have only a non-edible DVD, we both benefit from swapping the food and the movie. A different allocation of the same resources results in a net gain, with no externalized costs.
Capitalism is all about allocating resources to where they can do the most good through a mass of individual trades, each of which is expected—by those directly involved, who have the most at stake—to result in a net benefit without externalities.
Yes, and that's exactly what private capital holders would become in a libertarian society. With property ownership the only law, and no restrictions on private use of deadly force to protect those 'rights' ...
You have a contradiction here. Your private property rights (including self-ownership) are exactly the restrictions on the private use of deadly force which you claim wouldn't exist. So long as you respect the property rights of others, the law is on your side. Obviously there can still be crime; libertarians are not utopians. But the prospect of crime as crime is far superior to the same criminal actions being masqueraded as "legitimate" when undertaken by a government.
... there'd be no central government or social contract to prevent private individuals buying up all the local land, trade, and water rights, and then turning everyone else at literal gunpoint into lifetime-contracted debtors and renters
You seem to have completely missed the irony of fighting this hypothetical doomsday scenario by bringing in a government to claim ownership (via regulation) of all the land, trade, and water rights (without even buying any of it!), and forcing an involuntary social "contract" on everyone else at literal gunpoint which would make them lifetime debtors and renters (via income and property taxes, resp.). All the while arguing, moreover, that they have some inherent right to control everything and everyone and that anyone who chooses to resist is a bad person for doing nothing more than exercising their own natural rights. Your solution is strictly worse than the problem.
There would be no line at all between 'landlord' and 'feudal lord with absolute monopoly power'... after all, that's what landlord meant back in the Middle Ages.
Naturally, since in the Middle Ages landlords were the government, not mere private property owners. The prevailing attitude that they somehow had a "right to rule", the attitude which allowed them to go beyond simply owning property and get away with acts of aggression, is exactly what libertarians are so opposed to.
We haven't seen a true libertarian society yet.
Somalia.
Somalia is hardly a libertarian society—there may not be a central government, but tribal elders are granted a similar status at a more local level, with the power to make laws and meet out punishments as they see fit. However, if you were attempting to imply that a society without a central government, like Somalia, would necessarily be an undesirable place to live, you should compare Somalia now to Somalia back when they still had a government. By nearly every measure the people of Somalia experienced an increase in their standard of living after the central government fell. The one notable exception was a decline in the literacy rate, which is unsurprising when you consider that the former government was most likely attempting to boost the literacy rate to make itself look good regardless of the actual preferences of its citizens.
The broad scope of the warrant ensures this. Since there is a secret warrant backing this, this is not unconstitutional.
There are constitutional requirements for warrants which cannot be met so long as the warrant is secret:
no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
"A broad scope" would mean that the warrant fails fails to particularly describe the place to be searched. Moreover, the requirement for probable cause is fundamentally impossible to reconcile with the idea of a "secret warrant". Before a warrant can be issued, they have to establish probable cause, and produce the evidence ("Oath or affirmation") supporting it, at which point the warrant is no longer a secret.
Then there is the fact that legislating anything secret, or for that matter prohibiting any form of communication on any topic, runs squarely and obviously afoul of the First Amendment right to free speech... Whatever specific kinds of speech the authors may or may not have had in mind, there are no exceptions whatsoever in the text; not for national security, or copyright, or anything else.
Actually, it isn't necessarily illegal. It is definitely unconstitutional, which trumps legality in this country.
The Constitution is part of the law (the highest part), so any action which is unconstitutional is also illegal, regardless of any lesser laws claiming otherwise. Constitutionality doesn't trump legality, it trumps unconstitutional laws.
That's the problem right there. You can't encrypt a single message for multiple recipients without making a separate, encrypted copy for each recipient, unless every recipient has a copy of the same private key.
While that is true, most systems employ a mix of public- and private-key cryptography, if only because public-key crypto is comparatively slow and become more so for large plaintexts. The message itself is encrypted once with a single symmetric key, which is then encrypted separately for each recipient. There is thus no need to duplicate and distribute the entire message for each recipient, just the message-specific symmetric key.
There is a large amplification effect, so this is not a practical system for general mail delivery, any more than most people would use blind drops to exchange casual letters. It's reasonable so long as the encrypted messages represent a small fraction of the normal traffic on the forum. Any more and the forum operators will take steps to block such messages as spam.
Seeing how you can only use public key crypto for a 1:1 communication, this system would not scale at all.
You're thinking of shared (private) key crypto, where each channel needs a unique key. With public key crypto, he can distribute the public key to as many people as he wants, and any of them can send him a message securely by encrypting it with the public key and posting it to a public forum. Only the person with the corresponding private key can decrypt any of the messages, and if he's careful not to give away his interest in any particular encrypted messages, no one need know which ones he is capable of decrypting.
... SMTP is inherently unable to provide security against traffic analysis. Even if the body of the email is encrypted, the headers cannot be.
I2P-Bote is one alternative, an experimental distributed e-mail system which addresses the header issue. It's implemented as a distributed hash table with connectivity through I2P. The design allows senders and receivers to remain anonymous, in addition to encrypting the content of the messages.
It's because the only rights that the Republican party cares about are (a) the right to property...; and (b) the right to bear arms.
Given property and self-defense, all other rights follow naturally, at least within a system of negative rights (freedom from interference). Freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable search or seizure, the right to due process, and all the rest are just specific applications of your property rights.
On the other hand, if you subscribe to the idea of positive rights (the "right" to make others provide you with food, shelter, health care, etc.) then the objections to private property and people capable of defending themselves are understandable; but such a philosophy is inherently inconsistent anyway.
But then the bank charges interest, so then from 10 pounds of gold you end up with debtors owe 510 pounds..., and thus it becomes impossible ... for them to all pay off, since there is no longer enough gold in the world to cover the debts.
You can eventually pay off any debt, no matter how large, with any non-zero amount of currency, provided the currency remains in circulation. You just have to do it incrementally. You pay the bank, the bank puts the gold back into circulation (if only to pay its own expenses), you get paid, you pay the bank, etc.; repeat until the debt is paid. Naturally, both the interest rate and rate of circulation factor in to whether you can pay the loan off faster than it grows, but the actual amount of gold in the world isn't the main obstacle.
Also, the sort of fractional-reserve lending you describe has become much more prevalent, with lower actual reserves, with the addition of a central bank. Reserves were never as low under the free banking system as they became after the creation of the Federal Reserve, despite legally regulated minimum reserve requirements. Individual banks may be more stable due to FDIC deposit insurance, but the system as a whole is much closer to the edge.
The only question is whether the driver is a derivative work or not, which is a complicated legal term which didn't have software in consideration when it was (poorly) defined.
That is a complicated question, but in this case the real question is simpler: is the combination of the kernel and the driver on a running system a derivative work of the kernel? The two are distributed together, which makes it no different than a closed-source program distributed with a GPL library dependency. (Think of the kernel as the "library"—it doesn't matter which part is larger.) If binary modules do not violate the GPL, then GPL and LGPL are effectively equivalent for libraries, which would be a significant change.
It is much less likely that something like the nVidia binary driver, which is carefully not distributed with the kernel, or even specific to Linux, would be considered a derivative work. However, as you say, that area of copyright is not clearly specified for software.
Well then good thing the Linux kernel isn't licensed under the GPL. It's licensed under a modified GPL allowing for binary drivers.
Stop spreading misinformation. There is no exception for binary drivers. There is a clarification that the kernel copyright "does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of 'derived work'." User programs; not drivers. Otherwise it's stock GPLv2.
Here's the actual license so you can see for yourself.
A few companies like nVidia get around this by never distributing the drivers with the kernel. In nVidia's case, they use the same driver for Windows and Linux, so they can also argue that there is nothing Linux-specific about the part they're distributing. Even so, many see this as a grey area. The Android case is completely different, both because these are Linux-specific drivers and because they are being distributed with the Linux kernel on the same media as part of a complete operating system. This is just as much a violation of the license as distributing a closed-source program which depends on a GPL library.
It'd be one thing if this was in a third-party android device; nobody is insisting that Google must require every Android device to have open drivers, too.
No one is insisting that Google police all the other Android device manufacturers, no. However, anyone shipping an Android device with closed-source kernel drivers is not following the terms of the GPL, which means they have no license to redistribute the Linux kernel. Legally speaking, no matter what Google requires, it's a choice between open drivers and copyright infringement.
So who's going to do all the work and labor for those in the space station?
It's possible to be wealthy and still willing to put in some manual labor where necessary. Plenty of people with enough wealth to retire on still choose to work, or volunteer their time with various charities. Or they may be wealthy enough to find ways to avoid the need for what we would consider "work", for example through automation.